Tinder’s School of Swipe is a solid first step – but online dating safety has a long way to go
Tinder’s new consent education program represents the dating app’s latest effort to enhance young Australian users’ understanding and application of consent in online interactions.
The initiative, known as School of Swipe, was developed through a partnership between Chanel Contos, the founder of not-for-profit organisation Teach Us Consent, and the Women’s Services Network. Rather than being integrated directly within the app, School of Swipe directs users to an external platform where they can access a range of resources. These include the Dating Dictionary: Consent Edition, a series of informative videos created by the podcast duo the Relatables and additional contextual information provided by Contos herself.
School of Swipe comes in response to research conducted by Tinder that revealed troubling gaps in consent awareness among Australian youth. The study found that while many young Australians feel confident about their understanding of consent, significant misconceptions persist. Notably, 25% of gen z and millennial dating app users either incorrectly believe that stealthing – the non-consensual removal of a condom – is acceptable or are unsure of its legal status. Furthermore, a concerning 79% of respondents reported feeling pressure to conform to a partner’s intimate preferences rather than asserting their own boundaries.
Tinder’s initiative reflects a broader movement within the online dating industry to address criticism and enhance user safety. Historically Tinder has faced substantial scrutiny for its perceived failure to implement effective regulatory measures and collaborate with law enforcement to protect vulnerable users. The app has previously been criticised for contributing to an environment where harassment and abuse are prevalent.
In 2020 my research on dating apps and intimacy revealed that many women experienced technologically facilitated violence. This included unsolicited sexual imagery, harassment and stalking. Disturbingly, many women normalised these negative experiences, viewing them as inherent to using dating apps. The dating environment was often described as a “meat market”, reflecting the pervasive and distressing nature of these interactions.
The Australian government has also taken steps to address these problems. In January 2023 a national roundtable on online dating safety brought together representatives from the industry, governments, the family, domestic and sexual violence sectors, and victim-survivor advocates. The outcome of this meeting was a clear message to dating apps: self-regulate effectively or face formal regulation. In response, dating apps including Tinder have agreed to a voluntary code of conduct that includes improved collaboration with law enforcement, platform-wide bans on inappropriate behaviour, and enhanced user education.
Despite these developments, School of Swipe is not without its critics. One significant concern is the external nature of the website: not being accessible in the Tinder app may limit the program’s reach and impact. There is also concern that framing sexual violence as a matter of “miscommunication” or a lack of education may obscure deeper, systemic issues or downplay sexual violence. Education alone may not be sufficient to address the more profound issues that contribute to abuse.
Research indicates that certain groups are particularly vulnerable to online and offline dating violence. Women, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, LGBTIQIA+ individuals and Indigenous users often face intersecting forms of discrimination and abuse. These groups may benefit from more inclusive and culturally specific approaches that address their needs and ensure their voices are heard in the development of safety measures.
School of Swipe’s effectiveness will depend on its ability to engage with these diverse and vulnerable populations meaningfully. While the program represents an important step towards improving online dating safety, ongoing evaluation and adaptation will be crucial. The challenge remains to create a more comprehensive approach that not only educates users about consent but addresses the underlying problems of abuse and discrimination that persist in the online dating sphere.
As the industry continues to evolve, the focus on consent and user safety will remain critical. Initiatives including School of Swipe are a start, but they must be part of a broader, more inclusive strategy to ensure that all users can engage in safe and respectful interactions. The success of these efforts will be measured not just by the reach of educational programs but by tangible improvements in user safety and the reduction of harmful behaviours directed towards women and vulnerable users.
Dr Lisa Portolan is an academic at the University of Technology Sydney and the author of several books, including Love, Intimacy and Online Dating: How a Global Pandemic Redefined Intimacy
under the radar are busy changing election laws, reworking procedures, altering certification protocols, purging voters and laying the groundwork for six weeks of havoc after Americans vote on 5 November but before the electoral college gathers on 17 December.
Lower courts may brush aside this mayhem, as they did after the 2020 election. But if the election comes down to just one or two states with a photo finish, a Bush v Gore redux in which the court chooses the winner feels very much in play. The court divided along partisan lines in 2000; its partisan intensity, of course, has greatly intensified in the two decades since.
What’s terrifying is that the court has already proved the Republican party’s willing ally. The Roberts court laid much of the groundwork for this chaos in a series of voting rights decisions that reliably advantaged Republicans, empowered Maga caucuses even in swing states, then unleashed and encouraged those lawmakers to pass previously unlawful restrictions based on evidence-free claims of voter fraud.
Right now in Georgia, a renegade state election board – with Trump’s public gratitude – has enacted broad new rules that would make it easier for local officials to delay certifying results based on their own opinion that “fraud” occurred. Democrats have filed suit to block these changes; even the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, has sought to rein them in. But if those efforts fail, it could create a cascade of litigation and missed deadlines in perhaps the closest state of all.
That, in turn, could jeopardize the certification of Georgia’s slate of electors – and even encourage the Republican state legislature, a hotbed of election denialism in 2020, to select their own.
If that creates a terrifying echo of Bush v Gore, it should. In his influential 2000 concurrence, then chief justice William Rehnquist noted that Florida’s legislature would have been within its rights to name electors if court challenges threatened the state’s voice from being heard as the electoral college met. (A young Brett Kavanaugh explained the nascent independent state legislature theory to Americans during Bush v Gore;on the bench two decades later he would elevate it in aMoore v Harperconcurrence that weaponized it for this post-election season.)
Georgia’s not-so-subtle chicanery was enabled by the court’s 2013 decision inShelby county v Holder,which freed state and local entities in Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere from having to seek pre-approval before making electoral changes.
This was known as preclearance. It was the most crucial enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act and required the states with the worst histories on voter suppression to have any changes to election procedures pre-approved by the Department of Justice or a three-judge panel in Washington DC.
Its evisceration has had far-reaching consequences. Nearly all of them have helped Republicans at the ballot box by allowing Republican legislatures or other bodies to change the rules and place new barriers before minority voters, most of whom vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
If preclearance remained intact, these changes – and a wide variety of voter ID schemes, voter purges in Texas, Virginia and elsewhere that confuse non-citizens and naturalized citizens and perhaps intimidate some from voting, as well as new laws about absentee ballots and when and how they are counted – would have certainly been rejected by the Biden justice department. Much of Trump’s predictable post-election madness could have been brushed aside before it did damage.
That’s not the case now. Make no mistake: many actions underway at this very moment, with the very real risk of sabotaging the count, slowing the process and kicking everything into the courts, are Shelby’s demon chaos agents, bred for precisely this purpose.
Whether enabling extreme gerrymanders, freeing radicalized lawmakers to change procedures they could not touch without supervision only a few years ago, or transforming Rehnquist’s footnote into the dangerous ISL theory, the conservative legal movement and the court’s own decisions, time and again, have made it easier for a contested election to land on its doorstep.
And in that case, 180 million Americans might vote for president this fall, but the six Republicans on the US supreme court will have the final say. It shouldn’t surprise anyone if those robed partisans manufacture the theory to ensure the winner they prefer.
David Daley is the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. He is a senior fellow at FairVote
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